Applying the lunch box theory, Apple will go under the coming quarter. Skriv upp det!
The first half of the tech talk is over, and boy has it been amazing. Som many intriguing topics and awesome presenters, really neat to see the android-like navigation and hearing the concepts live and in stereo. Time to eat!

First session is over. Lots of stuff regarding focus. Pretty ironic considering the venue. If you look closely you can see the pillars obstructing the view, behind all the German heads. But a really interesting session. It really really feels great to be a part of the Future of TV. We were showed som nice features of TvOS, and a really bad Focus Guide example. Can’t wait for the next session, game controllers. Not the future of gaming, but pretty close.

Mitte. “Tysklands hjärtas hjärta” as we say in Sweden. Yours truly are live blogging from Apple Tech Talks in Berlin. Awesome topics, engineers and it’s really amazing to learn cutting edge knowledge for the Future of TV. And it’s also the Worst Venue Ever. Buckle up Apple! More to come…

In the blink of an eye over one thousand days have passed, and where have we been? The blog has been drier than California and the once so steady beat of the war drum has echoed of to a better place. But today, we celebrate the return of the original conquistadores of the mobile platform. Time to resurface.

So what have we done during this era of non-awesomness? Spent ages just walking in circles, “just to make the point”? Becoming the new champions of open source? Doing backstrokes in the good ol’ money bin? Nobody knows, but if you look closely, some apps may have flown under the radar and made the world a slightly less pointless place.

But here we are now, so let us entertain you. In the coming days, weeks, years or maybe never, we will release something so fun, clever and awesome and so god damn innovative that it will change every social gamers life forever. We call it The Future of Gaming. Vasco da Gama. So stay tuned for more news, cuz that thing coming over the hill is a monster. A monster!
In the meantime, check out Flip! One of our kick ass developers has infiltrated a local firm and helped them make a genre defining game. It’s a touch friendly version of one of the few board games that still hasn’t been conquered by the human mind, so the AI here is truly remarkable. Yup, it’s the beloved simulation of the race war: Reversi. You owe it to yourself and your inner demon to check out this baby. It’s free as in free beer, and takes up less space than Top Gun at 4K, so hurry up before its to late! And even though the developers gives it away for free, feel free to buy me a beer next time we meet if you like it.

Around 2009 when ÖeG was doing client work we had an internal library of useful stuff called “libogen” that we had intentions of open sourcing, but it never happened unfortunately. I think it may have come down to a political discussion where Gonas is part Finnish, has a good memory and is firmly against communism. I don’t even remember what code was in there but it’s probably outdated by now.

Instead I hereby present OEGParseBackedModel, a small class that we use internally together with Parse, a backend as a service provider. Make your model classes subclass OEGParseBackedModel and define properties, and they will be mapped to a PFObject and stored on the backend. Useful for when you want to add other methods, validations, etc. to your Parse models.

Maybe this will start a tradition where we will release more useful stuff on GitHub, or maybe we won’t get around to that and we’ll just have a really lame looking GitHub account with one tiny project. We don’t care.

Parse

We’ve been using Parse for prototyping a couple of apps so far. A lot of apps use Parse in production, but for us it usually becomes more work to try and frame our features within the framework than just writing our own backend after a while. They iterate at a great pace though, and it’s exciting to see what they come up with next.

Say hello to our latest app! Status Report is a combined client for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Foursquare (so far) that mixes all of your feeds into one grand unified feed. It also combines mirrored updates into one, for when someone mirrors their Twitter posts into their Facebook stream, or tweets every Instagram shot and you follow them on both services.

It also has support for liking, commenting, retweeting, favoriting etc. depending on the service the update comes from. You can also write new status updates and choose which of your connected services you want to send them from.

When following links you can save them to Instapaper for later reading regardless of which service the link was posted to.

I can’t even remember what life was like before this app when I had to tap through a whole bunch of different apps several times a day just to get the lay of the land. It has totally changed my life, maybe it will change yours too! It’s just 99 cents on the App Store so give it a try and tell us what you think 😀

What’s going on in the world of ÖeG lately? Well Gonas has become too old for music festivals and startups but we’re still going strong anyway. Mia’s undying love for intuitive interaction and my obsession for nerdy stuff continues to breed new apps for your enjoyment. Or your kid’s enjoyment if you have one. Yup, ÖeG has gone pedagogical and I’m announcing the results here on the blawgh today! Actually we released these apps months ago but I haven’t written about them on the blog yet, for the simple reason most parents and 3-year olds don’t read blogs. But then I thought, hey even if you don’t have kids you may be interested in the fact that we are still alive, kicking and making awesome apps. Anyway here they are:

Kids ABC

A simple educational app/game for iPad and iPhone where kids can learn the names of animals. Available in English and Swedish. A fairly big update is almost ready and will be released soon!

Who was it?

Similar app for iPad and iPhone where you learn to recognize the droppings and tracks of different animals. Also available in English and Swedish.

In the next few days we will reveal an entirely different (non-kidz) app which is currently in closed beta testing! Stay tuned and support the troops.

Behold our latest game! Math21 is a crazy addictive card game where you use your huge brain to combine five cards and reach 21. The game uses OpenFeint for leaderboards, and the goal is to solve a whole deck of cards (10 hands) in the shortest time possible! This is totally a game changer in the educational action card game landscape. The stunning graphics and user experience design are of course made by our genius interaction designer Mia.

The app is called Instaframe, and it’s a digital photo frame for your iPad that show pictures uploaded with the popular iPhone app Instagram. The app uses the Instagram API but is not endorsed or certified by Instagram.

The way it works is that you can configure it to show pictures from your feed, your own pictures, the popular feed or the latest pictures taken near your current location. The last one is the default and it’s a pretty cool way to see some pics of your city and see what’s up (all through the lens of hipster-friendly retro filters). E.g. today, if you live in Gothenburg, Sweden as we do, you would see that 100% of all local Instagram users are currently documenting “Andra långdagen” (a street festival at Andra långgatan)